Building a Second Brain

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The ultimate point of all this is to express yourself. It's to take in all these ideas from the outer world, but then you combine them with ideas and insights from your inner world. My inspiration for this was legos. You know, most people have played with the little plastic blocks known as legos. We can create our digital environment in such a way that we can move toward what we're passionate about,. The more diverse and different and unusual those pieces were, the better. I'm never, ever, ever starting from scratch. That's what think we want to avoid - starting with a blank page which is so terrifying.

In the modern age, people are bombarded with more information, and are more personally responsible for managing that information, than ever before. How do you stay on top of your schedule, work responsibilities, financial obligations, and the spigot of media that runs full force 24/7 while not only avoiding becoming overwhelmed, but actually using all that information to generate better ideas, advance your career, and generally improve your life?

My guest would say that the answer lies in having a mind outside your mind. His name is Tiago Forte and he's the author of Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. Today on the show, Tiago explains how a Second Brain is an external resource where you can store all of the most valuable checklists, thoughts, notes, ideas, and insights you acquire and generate. He explains how the Second Brain supercharges the historical practice of keeping a commonplace book, and how it improves your productivity and well-being by getting stuff out of your head, off your bandwidth, and into a place where you can actually put it to use. Tiago then walks us through this system of "Personal Knowledge Management," including the tools you can use to capture information, the question to ask yourself to decide what to capture, and why he recommends organizing what you capture around action instead of subject. And Tiago explains how the ultimate goal of having a Second Brain is to take what you put into this treasury and synthesize it into better ways to live, think, act, and express yourself.